Cronyist Journalism Measure Could Prompt Facebook To Ban News
From Reason:
The worst ideas in Congress never die; they just get sneaked into unrelated bills. This week, that means lawmakers are reportedly trying to burrow a bad media protectionism bill into defense spending authorization. It’s called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), and it’s a doozy of bad incentives and state favoritism…
A group of 26 organizations—including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Niskanen Center, the R Street Institute, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—issued a letter yesterday urging lawmakers to not attach the JCPA to any pending legislation.
“The JCPA will compound some of the biggest issues in our information landscape and do little to enable the most promising new models to improve it,” the groups wrote before laying out specific issues they see with the bill. Among these are that the JCPA sets “a legal and political precedent that some uses of content that were once free of charge now require payment” and that “large media conglomerates can dominate negotiations, and small outlets would be unheard if not hurt.”
